Category: Foreigners in N. Korea

By holding two journalists as hostages (it’s now pretty much beyond denying) and sentencing them to 12 years of “reform through labor,” North Korea has managed to inflame the media in a way that starving 2 million people and putting 200,000 others in concentration camps never quite did.  With the attention to Ling and Lee comes a delayed epiphany:  maybe North Korea’s regime really is evil: Washington Post, Blaine Harden:  N. Korean Women Who Flee to China Suffer in Stateless...

[Update: Twelve years is also the maximum sentence. Obviously, the North Koreans are sending a message. The message is, “This one is going to cost you.”] North Korea on Monday sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontational stance toward the United States. The Central Court, the highest court of North Korea, held the trial of the...

You have to wonder why a court would take three days to announce its judgment on a charge as simple as illegal border crossing. Seriously, this isn’t international money laundering or a complex stock manipulation scheme. Did they cross the border or didn’t they? The issue becomes even simpler when the results are pre-ordained the the judicial procedure is, shall we say, streamlined: […] Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda described to the human rights group Amnesty International in a written report...